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New route in the Eiger Northface: "Paciencia"
Length 27 pitches / 900m, difficulty 8a
First ascent: Stephan Siegrist and Ueli Steck summer 2003
First freeclimb: Ueli Steck August 30, 2008
Finally we made it! Five years have passed since Stephan Siegrist
and I first ascended the route on the North Face of the Eiger during the
hottest summer ever in 2003. Now, I was able to climb every of the
27 pitches redpoint.
Stephan belayed and supported me. Together
we climbed this very difficult and demanding rock climb on the Eiger
Northface. Two pitches have the difficulty of 7c+, one pitch 8a and
the rest of the pitches vary mostly between 7a and 7b+.
Since the summer of 2003, Stephan and I have been trying to free climb the route.
This means that the route has to be climbed without falling and the bolts and the installed
belays cannot be used to forward or to rest. The route is climbed only by using the natural
structures: the rock. Only when a route is free climbed, is she definitively climbed. And now she
also has a name. "Paciencia," which means "patience."
Less than an hour from San Francisco, dairy cattle graze peacefully in grassy pastures. Marin County used to have hundreds of small dairy farms. Today, only a handful remain. Suburbanization, coupled with rising costs, pushed out most of the ranchers. Those that remain operate on thin margins.
2008 has turned out to be an exceptionally dry year. Drought conditions mean dry pastures. Dry pastures mean hungry cows. Since the pastures aren't producing enough grass to support the herds, ranchers are resorting to supplementary feed, buying expensive hay to keep their cattle going.
Drought conditions have had a heavy impact on Marin County's ranchers, and some fear that this year's drought may do them in. Listen to one rancher's story on KQED.org.
As much as I love the mountains, and the thrill of exposure and the excitement of adventure, sometimes it's all too much and my nerves get a little frail. When that happens, it's time to go on vacation and relax.
Some say my life is already a big ol' vacation already. I'd like to argue though. Cornices, seracs, rockfall, unplanned open bivies, scary descents, constantly dehydrated, and never well rested. Climbing mountains is no cakewalk. So where do I go here do I go to get away from it all?
If you don't subscribe to the Mountain Hardwear monthly newsletter, you missed our initial invitation to tell us what you did this summer. We created a Google Map for Hardwear fans to share their summer stories. We'd love to hear from you -- take a minute and visit our map, tell us what you did, and see what other Hardwear fans did with their hard-earned summer vacations.
In order for the map tool to work, you'll have to sign up for a Google account. If you already have a gmail account, or use other Google services, you're set.
Here is the play by play on our three day journey:
September 10: After a late night at the Mahoneys, Freddie and I had success making it to our bus in Newburyport, then into Boston, then to Chicago. Freddie picked Ben Ditto out of a crowd while we sat at a bar waiting for our overnight flight to Delhi, and the group was 3/4 complete. Ben, though, was on his way to the counter to find out if they would hold the Delhi flight for our 4th, Pat Goodman, who was delayed in Charlotte. They refused to hold the plane, so eventually we boarded and nested in for our long overseas flight. As they announced closing the doors, Pat suddenly appeared! Yeehaw! But would his bags?
September 11, minus about 12 ours of our life from the time change:
Arrive in hot Delhi around 8 pm. All the bags show except, you guessed it, Pat's. Freddie entertains himself by sitting on the conveyor belt behind a Mountain Hardwear duffel bag, filming (part of our assignment on this trip is to use our recently acquired film school skills). We think the shot will go well with Jaws music later on. Pat runs around trying to find someone to help him locate the bags and eventually with many phone calls and near tantrums, he has promise of the bags arriving in Manali within a few days.
We all head through customs, with the mission of finding a taxi to leave immediately for Manali, 16 hours away. This is a challenge, it being 8 pm and us knowing no one and being deliriously out of place and exhausted. We eventually get roped in by the guy who talked the loudest, and within an hour we have the bags strapped on the roof of the Toyota SUV and we are on our way, with our man, Mr. Pal in the drivers seat. We all go in and out of consciousness, due to exhaustion, even as we witness one of the most wild driving any of us have seen. A combination of a Mr.Pal's lead foot; big trucks to dodge from both ways; skinny, winding, unkempt roads; and occasional obstacles (mopeds, people, cows and rivers).
September 12: We all crack a beer to toast the fact that we are actually here at around 9 am. Mr. Pal asks us if this is normal. We keep driving.
The summer was hot and the weather very stable. It's the summer of the century in Switzerland. Thanks to this long lasting and beautiful weather period of time, Stephan Siegrist and I spent nearly the whole summer in the Eiger Northface. From June 29 to June 30 we redpointed the route "La Vida es Silbar." We climbed the route as roped party and in alternative lead. The summer came to its end. The volume of our arm muscles grew continuously during this summer and our "Hilti" hand drill was in continuous operation. Exhilarated by the good weather we opened a new route through the "Rote Fluh" over the "Tschenpfeiler", which end underneath the Eiger summit on the west side. The result of that summer was the freeclimb of "La Vida es Silbar" and a new established route to the left of it.
So we had a new project to go for. We were happy to climb again in this very particular ambiance of the Eiger Northface. She will keep us busy, this new route to redpoint: fear, doubts, solutions. All the things which makes climbing so special. We will make it next year: we were so sure about it.
2008
Five years have passed since and the new route is still waiting to be freeclimbed by Stephan and me. But also in this summer the weather is not at all "Swiss Quality."
In February I was fit as a fiddle. But after my return from the expedition in June, I had to start more or less from zero with my workout. Stephan didn't go on expedition, so he was able to fully concentrate on his climbing. During July and August Stephan and I spent totally five days in the route. We studied pitch by pitch and we got used to the thunderstorms, which came up in the evenings. Unfortunately we never found the entire route totally dry. Nevertheless some of the pitches were. The first pitch of the second bivouac band was always wet. "It will work, somehow", I thought. It's a very difficult part just at the beginning. The following 30 meters are not difficult to climb. At least that was what we thought we remembered. But this was five years ago...
The other big questionmark remains the very steep fourth pitch in the "Roten Fluh." She just dropped me, after a long climbing day before the belay. For me it was a problem of endurance and it should be possible to freeclimb this pitch. All the other difficult pitches were climbed redpoint. We pressed the difficult pitches, and their solutions, into our minds.
What we needed from now on were two days of good and steady weather. We were damned to wait. At mid August it snowed. We couldn't believe it that that it would be over now. Everything was just running fine and now it seemed that we had to wait another more year to redpoint this route. Our hope is fading with every day that goes by. The weather forecast announced good and stable meteorological conditions from August 25 until August 31. The Eiger Northface still has snow, but we want to give it a try. We went up on August 29. Maybe to just catch our gear but always with a spark of hope that we will redpoint this new route. Everything looked dry. But it was cold. But there she was: our last chance.
There it is, that wine-dark sky, the impossibly pure snow, and that supernaturally sharp rock. Nothing in nature could look this way, and still the image feels right. I saw Adams's photograph before I ever saw the real thing. I have never been able to look at Half Dome without thinking of "Monolith."
In a strange way, Adams's photograph gives us a more precise visual experience of the sublime than the object itself ever could. The photograph gives us a concise summary of the alpine experience: the light, the air, the strange sharpness, the darkened sky. Half Dome is immense, possibly infinite (the bottom edge of "Monolith" slices across the cliff bottom, so we never see the rock's edge). We may or may not be able to reach the cliff -- it isn't distant, but the photograph gives us no clear method of crossing the void between the photographer's space (defined by the small snow-covered spit to the right, occupied by a lonely, gnarled tree) and Half Dome. There are no topographic features to facilitate human motion. We might fly, but flight lies in the province of birds -- or gods.
Mountain Hardwear is a proud sponsor of Powderwhore's new film, "The Pact." The film's producers say it best, "This film is about the commitment to the endless search for untracked snow and those who've chosen to follow that path."
Mountain Hardwear sponsors a wide range of expeditions. If you have an original project that you believe deserves sponsorship, we'd like to hear from you.
Applications for the 2009 Expedition season are due on November 15, 2008.
Of Caves and Bones: Finding Water in the Driest Place on Earth
Editor's Note: J. Judson Wynne is a cave research scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey, Southwest Biological Science Center and the SETI Institute, Carl Sagan Center, and is a PhD student in Biology at Northern Arizona University. Wynne is also an adventure athlete and longtime Mountain Hardwear user -- which is why we're featuring his story on our blog.
Chile's Atacama Desert is arguably the driest place on earth. Cave scientist J. Judson Wynne (who goes by "Jut") and his fellow researchers are studying caves in the Atacama Desert as part of Phase 2 of the "Earth-Mars Cave Detection Program." This is a three-year exobiology research project that hopes to explore Martian caves for signs of life. As Wynne explains, "If there's life on Mars, the best place to look is underground."
Glen Cushing, Wynne's colleague at Northern Arizona University, explains that caves are attractive, because "the Martian surface is an extremely harsh environment" and caves might protect microorganisms from surface radiation. Cushing spotted dark, ovoid spots on the Martian surface, and speculated that they might be caves, rather than craters. If there truly are caves on Mars, Cushing notes, they could "become habitats for future explorers, or could be the only structures that preserve evidence of past or present microbial life."
Fast forward, then, to the Atacama expedition. Before scientists can explore caves on Mars, they must hone their skills here on Earth. So Wynne and his fellow researchers decided to head to the Atacama Desert. As Wynne explains, "Because we can't go to Mars just yet, planetary scientists seek out places on Earth that are the most Mars-like. The Atacama is characterized by high UV (due to its high elevation), wide diurnal temperature fluctuations, hyper-arid and has been hyper-arid for millions of years -- a lot like Mars." All in all, the Atacama Desert presents an excellent opportunity to study an "analogue" to the Martian environment.
In the Atacama, the team's goal is to "define mission and instrumentation requirements for detecting caves on Mars using thermal infrared imagery."
While perhaps not beyond the realm of possibilities even for the driest place on earth, Wynne and his crew did not expect to find water there. Nor did they expect to find so many animal bones.
The scientists found a subterranean water deposit in one of their study caves. In an interview with LiveScience (an online science magazine), Wynne said, "Much to my surprise, as we moved halfway through this passage, my foot completely sunk into the soil. It was mud! There was a lot of it. It is all contained within the salt stream flow that meandered through the passage."
Wynne is currently working with other scientists to determine how the water was deposited in this cave.
More spectacular, perhaps, was the scientists' discovery of the Cuevita de Huesos ("Small Cave of the Bones"). The bones proved a startling surprise.
Wynne described the discovery in his blog, "We found hundreds of thousands of bones and skulls eroding out of the cave walls...mixed in with tree branches...I'm not certain whether these animals were dumped into this small piping cave by prehistoric people or whether these animals were trapped in a flood and accumulated in the portion of the unconsolidated sediment, which is now the piping cave."
Visit Wynne's blog for a day-by-day account of the team's adventures in Atacama.
Wynne will return to Bolivia and Chile in November, to assist in a research project to study high elevation lakes - two of these lakes are located in the calderas of a 15,000 foot and 19,000 foot volcano.
